Legally, higher education institutions are required to have a course catalog. But there are marketing benefits to having one as well.

There are a few ways to leverage your course catalog in your marketing, each with its own effort and cost. One of the easiest and most cost-efficient ways is to thoughtfully build it into your existing CMS or your redesign plan.

Here are some keys to integrating a course catalog.

Building the Course Catalog for the Website

The foundational element of all course catalogs is courses. To have a catalog on your website, each course should include specific information. That data contains:

• Course Suffix and Number
• Course Title
• Course Description
• Pre-requisites (if not contained in the course description)
• Cross-listings (if not contained in the course description)
• Department
• Faculty who teaches or have taught this course

In Content Management Systems (CMS) like Ingeniux, you have the choice between two methods of storing re-usable data – a page or a component. If you’re unfamiliar with this idea, think of a page as a self-contained organism with its unique URL, while a component is a symbiote that can’t live on its own. When it comes to how courses live in your CMS, the choice between a page and a component is a marketing/front-facing one as both have the same functionality for syndication of content.

If you want to link the course information in your news stories or press releases, display rich media like sample syllabus, in-class photos, sample recorded lecture or marketing-centric video, or show up as individual links in searches, then you want to create each course as a separate page.

One of the most significant benefits of using a CMS is content re-use and data across the website. The obvious place is to bring all that data into a course listing. Unlike a static html course, you can have multiple lists, such as interdisciplinary programs that pull courses from different programs.

Another place to leverage course information once you have it in the CMS is to pick out certain interesting classes and display them as Featured Courses (or if you’re really feeling like Fonzie, call them Cool Courses, hey). You could further use courses to populate a list of “Classes Taught” by individual faculty members on their faculty pages.  

The largest variable in the display of a course catalog is how program requirements are displayed. Sometimes simple XHTML that’s manually input and edited is the best bet when there is absolutely no consistent way in which programs display their requirements.

Having symmetry in how requirements are laid out is essential, especially when it comes to indenting content or automatically linking to course pages (or open a lightbox with the course description).

There are other pages and features that can make up an online catalog. It’s usually a good idea to have a detail page type for admission or tuition information, a way to build a directory, and an academic calendar. Other features your users may appreciate are a catalog-specific search, A to Z indexing, and a section dropdown to skip between areas.

The final things to consider are how to get the data into and then out of the CMS.

Importing and Exporting Course Data into the CMS

Getting data into your CMS depends on the system used by the registrar. If the system can export course data, you can import that information into the CMS and match fields in the course page/component.

Once the import mapping is correct, you need to decide how often the export runs. The inverse of that is to manually input the data (assuming you do not have the budget to work through a full import project).

There’s also a hybrid model of programmatically importing the initial data and manually changing it once it’s in the CMS – which may be the best model depending on how much massaging of the data needs to be done.

The final part is to be able to then export all the required information into a printable format – either as a Word document or a PDF. A good export tool can match styles to what you currently have as a printable format and easily export different types of information, including pages, components, or even pesky tables.

The Benefit of Using a CMS to Manage Your Course Catalog

Course catalogs can often be a land-mine project with multiple offices owning pieces of the content. Using a product you already know to handle the web display and printable project is one less headache.

Feel free to use this guide as a way to prepare for managing a course catalog in your CMS.